Page 84 of Book Club Confidential

Hallie’s gaze flickered to hers, then away. “Deciding to quit kind of sealed my fate.”

“No, it didn’t,” Tessa said. “You decide your fate. Are you sure marrying Bryce is what you want?” she asked carefully, removing all judgment from her heart and tone. This was Hallie’s life. Tessa didn’t have to understand it or agree with it to support it. She just had to love Hallie, and she did.

Hallie released a trembling breath, then retrieved a pair of flattened boxes without answering. She passed one to Tessa. “We’d better get started.”

Hallie played Shania Twain while they worked, singing quietly along. In college, Shania was sometimes the only one who could get Hallie out of a funk or motivate her to tackle something she didn’t want to do.

This felt like one of those moments, and Tessa moved as slowly as possible, hoping Hallie would suddenly stop and change her mind.

Unfortunately, the kitchen packed up easily, and they finished in no time. Hallie kept the entire space immaculate and highly organized, which made quick work of the process. The dining room, half bath, and living room were much the same.

Upstairs, however, was a different story.

The second floor was Hallie’s lair, overflowing with all the things her pack rat heart had collected over the years. The sheer volume of books alone would require a separate U-Haul to transport.

Hallie adjusted the playlist to songs from their college days as they worked on the second floor. They reminisced over photos and prizes won at amusement parks in their early days as friends, then stopped working completely to jam out to their favorite indie bands. When they broke for snacks, Hallie went downstairs to call Kate and perform her culinary magic.

Upstairs, Tessa moved on to the hall closet.

She froze in awe and wonder. At least one of everything known to man waited inside. “Some people have a junk drawer,” she mused. “Hallie has a whole damn closet.”

Tessa sorted things into piles on the floor. Clothes in one place, bedsheets in another. Office items here. Tchotchkes there.

A three-inch-thick black binder with a cloth cover and worn golden lettering wobbled loose from a pile of old textbooks, and she grinned. Hallie hadn’t made a wedding planner for one of the biggest days of her life, but in college she’d spent months on an assignment perfecting a plan for her future dinosaur-slash-vampire-themed café. And it was perfection.

Tessa sat on the floor beside the piles and opened the binder on a torrent of nostalgia. She’d been with Hallie the night she bought the binder and all the craft supplies to put it together. And she’d delighted in Hallie’s unbridled enthusiasm as she worked on the plans.

The images inside were neatly clipped from magazines or hand drawn by Kate at Hallie’s instruction. Every imagined space was anchored in shades of black and deepest purple, lit with golden accents and natural light, often filtered through stained glass windows. The menu’s design inspiration involved crows, shiny objects, depression, and darkness to the point of humor, much like the fictional café’s creator. Plus, her favorite television vampire could turn into a crow, so according to Hallie, it all made perfect sense.

Occasionally, she’d added notations about dinosaurs. Tessa laughed.

“Do you want root beer or cider?” Hallie called. “It’s fall. We should embrace the season. I packed my bakeware, but for food I have apples, caramel, and a microwave.”

“I’ll have root beer if we’re making caramel apples,” Tessa called. “Did you reach Kate?”

“No answer, but snacks are almost ready!”

Tessa carried the binder to the kitchen. “Look at what I found.”

Hallie unwrapped caramels and dropped them into a bowl. “I had to unpack a— Sweet Mary Margaret, is that the Vampire Dinosaur Café?”

Tessa smiled. “Indeed.”

Hallie hadn’t been able to decide on a name. Mostly because her entrepreneurship professor lectured at length about the importance of reaching the most customers. He’d given her a D on a paper she’d written about her café, claiming vampires were too niche, especially in Virginia, and she’d refused to move the café to somewhere like New Orleans to capitalize on the motif. Dinosaurs were her runner-up choice, but she worried about competition from the Dinosaur Café in Orlando, which she’d visited in high school with the marching band. She’d eventually decided to merge the two themes and spelled the name out in golden letters across the binder’s cover. Hallie’s Vampire Dinosaur Café.

She started the microwave, then took the binder from Tessa while the caramels melted. “Oh, man. I love this place.” She ran a loving fingertip across the page. “Bryce thinks it’s ridiculous that I talk about it as if it’s a real place, but to me it is, you know? How many hours did I spend here in my mind?”

“Many,” Tessa said. “We all did.” It was a fun escape to think of what their lives would be one day, when they finished school and launched their careers. “We loved working on this with you. Seeing you all bright and peppy.”

“I have never been peppy.”

Tessa snorted but didn’t argue, though she heavily disagreed. She grabbed the bottles of locally crafted root beers, then whacked off the caps using the countertop’s edge and her palm—a trick she’d learned in college.

She smiled, pleased, when the little discs went flying. “Still got it.”

“Cupboards are empty,” Hallie said while Tessa collected the caps for the trash. “So today we’ll be enjoying the sodas straight from the bottle, instead of over ice in a mug.”

“How bohemian of us.”